Big East Tournament - St. John's

So this is it. We are less than an hour away from the beginning of the so-called “second season” . . . the Big East tournament. The beginning of our first season (the regular season) started off with a bang. We were predicted to finish 7^th in the league (wouldn’t that be nice right now?) but we played like one of the top teams in the league and ended up beating two of the top teams in the country – one on the road. We beat Syracuse soundly at home and played Duke tough and after that the wheels came off.

Why that was we will never know for sure. There are many explanations but the bottom line is that we never looked the same after that game. Rumors abound (maybe not so much but there were some rumors) of internal discord on the team: an argument between Jessie Sapp and Chris Wright on the court – the senior leader who had his worst season as a Hoya or certainly the season during which his play fell the furthest behind how well he was expected to play and the sophomore PG with freshman level of experience who will presumably be the leader of the Hoyas in the future. If those two actually don’t get along, that would create huge problems for the team. Was it some selfish bad apple of a player who didn’t know how to play nice or play at all with his teammates? Summers? Monroe? Who knows.

One this is for sure Monroe did not recover from that technical foul called on him while he was on the bench and I don’t know that he ever played consistently well from the Duke game forward like he did at the beginning of the season. Another thing is sure, we never were able to play consistently since then. Players seemed to be trying to do too much at the wrong time (jacking up 3’s, driving overly aggressively to the hole and passing up open teammates) or doing too little at the wrong time (passing up lay-ups or easy inside baskets to make an extra pass). If you think about those kinds of mistakes, you forget more about the players-don’t-get-along-chemistry theory of the downfall and just think more about a young team that just couldn’t figure out a system having players who were used to taking over games themselves. Now that those guys were in leadership roles, their tendency was to try to take a game over rather than play within a system. Whereas last year, Freeman, Wright, Summers and even Sapp were never asked to take over games because they weren’t leaders on the team or the primary go-to-guy, they would have been more likely to stick to the system and make big plays within the system. This season, when they were supposed to lead, they forgot the system and went outside it when it came down to crunch time whether in the game or even within one 35 second possession. Then you add in Monroe who is just learning the system and you have a total mess when it comes to how the team is going to play when it really counts.

So then the theory is more that this is a young team whose senior leader did a disappearing act leaving a huge void in leadership and knowledge of the system on the floor leading to players thinking too much at times and the when being told they were thinking too much (or realizing they were thinking too much) swinging in the other direction and reacting too much. But then why do so well at the beginning of the year when they would know even less about the system? My only explanation for that (if you are scrapping the idea that something happened during or right after the Duke game and the players do not get along) is that a young team when faced with expectations has a harder time living up to them then when there are no expectations, and/or young teams are likely to believe their hype and think they can just show up on the floor or in practice and just win games because they beat Uconn on the road.

Either way, as much as I would like to see everything click and have these Hoyas get it together and put together a nice string of wins, we have all been waiting for something to click all year and it has not. It is March Madness and anything can happen but it is not likely that anything will click this year. There will be no magical ending to this season. Hopefully, though, if nobody goes to the NBA and nobody transfers, this will be the year that all of our players chalk up to a learning experience; JTIII shows any doubters out there that he still has it; and this same team does something special next year. I think we all got caught up in the possibility of this year being the year given how good they looked early on, but the reality is that we won’t know until the end of next season what this season really meant. That being said, I’ve got my fingers crossed and hope that we at least show some level of manhood and get ourselves to the semis of the BET. That’s a lot to ask but it would be enough to end the season on a high note and increase the possibility of next year being the real thing.